Varied Activities and Materials

I teach to get energy and immediacy flowing through the class. I favor activities that make students engage each other's ideas or practice new skills as a learning community. I lend each class its own rhythm by incorporating warmups, group or pair work, explanation and discussion. I address diverse learning styles by introducing variety: oral drills, grammar review, writing and listening exercises, games, drama, simulations, debates. I keep things lively and culturally relevant by including films, songs, photos and maps. I find real situations to confront so that students better integrate new material and draw on their background knowledge. I assign online reading journals so that discussion relates to their ideas. When I perceive a need for extra materials, I make them, in particular multimedia such as songs or video clips, as for example an archive I created of excerpts from a French TV series.

Reflective Teaching

I am also devoted to reflective teaching: thinking about course style and content and always trying to improve. Drawing on my experience as a Teaching Consultant at Brown University's Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, I try to invite a colleague or two to visit my classes each year, in order to welcome feedback of all kinds. I read student evaluations carefully to see what lessons and techniques students preferred, and keep track of assignment formats to fine-tune those that are most effective. I put considerable effort into making students feel comfortable, and typically use an online Learning Management System to post material and to make expectations as transparent as possible for quizzes, tests and papers. Moreover, mapping out course aims and activities in this way allows for reuse of media within a stable, adaptable structure. I enjoy using technology to amplify effective pedagogical practices and have had particular success in this regard with my "French through Songs and Singing" educational website, which currently averages 60,000 hits per month from an international audience.

Challenging, Motivating Courses

My goals include staying in touch with student interests while also implementing challenging courses. In addition to formulating program objectives that take these interests into account, I remain current in various fields through conferences, professional memberships and listserves, and incorporate related books, articles and ideas so as to foreground an interplay of critical voices. I develop courses where students simultaneously improve their knowledge of subject areas across disciplines, discover other cultures in depth and spend generous amounts of time practicing their language skills. In my dual role as teacher and mentor, I balance academic rigor with a relaxed atmosphere and seek out professional development experiences to keep my skills fresh, including a 2007 ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview Assessment Workshop and a 2008 AATF Summer Seminar in Switzerland and Belgium. In sum, I empower learners to analyze issues from multiple perspectives, to build cultural bridges and to see the world with new eyes.

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